Echo Dot

People used to say the same thing about books. There was a lot of moral panic about children sitting inside reading rather than being outside and playing with their friends. Then it was comic books, then it was TV, then it was dungeons and dragons, then it was the internet, now it’s chatbots.

If there is some detrimental effect, I would like an explanation as to how it’s detrimental, rather than just a lot of hearsay.

Would we be able to see it from earth?

I’ve seen pictures of the earth from the moon and you can barely identify the continents. You definitely can’t see individual open cast mines.

Ok but walk it back a bit, why did they become homeless?

If somebody is completely 100% mentally healthy I can’t see how an AI can convince them to kill themselves any more than another person could convince them to kill themselves. Only vulnerable people join cults, because it’s difficult to pray on people who have proper defences.

I’m still not convinced that the AI isn’t just triggering some underlying mental condition that other people in their lives are just not aware of or not willing to accept.

Some people think that LLMs are true AGI or at least they have thoughts that run along those lines even if they can’t articulate it like that.

They tend to be people who aren’t particularly tech savvy and so they see this thing that seems to be pretty much a miracle of technology and believe that it truly is a super intelligence.

I’ve seen evolution simulators come up with some truly interesting behaviour, like finding shortcut glitches in Mario that no human has ever found, if I didn’t know how the program worked I suppose I might believe that there was some intelligence there.

I’d had a negative opinion of Asimov’s laws of robotics being used to control AI for most of my life, and LaMDA successfully persuaded me to change my opinion.

Then he’s an idiot.

Asimov’s laws of robotics aren’t some kind of model by which to control AI, there are plot device. They’re literally not supposed to work, if they did work it would be a very short book, so obviously we shouldn’t use them for controlling AI.

I don’t know any serious IT professional that has ever, at any point, ever forwarded the opinion that an AI (should we ever a create one, because there is an arguement that LLMs aren’t AI) should be ruled by a plot device from a book. Equally if we ever invent warp drive and find aliens I’m assuming we’re not going to be restricted to the prime directive.

I think the important point here is that just because the father is doing Google doesn’t necessarily mean that Google are at fault. People tend to feel that if an individual is suing a corporation for malfeasance the corporation is necessarily guilty. But reality doesn’t always run like that.

I can’t see any reason that Google would want to encourage more suicide so I have to assume that it’s just an unfortunate interaction of a mentally unsound mind and a product that frankly even its own creators don’t understand. This is highly unfortunate but I’m not certain where the crime was.

Yes people can have mental delusions and psychotic episodes; I’m not necessarily convinced that they are a separate unique condition simply because they were triggered by an AI versus anything else.

For one thing I’ve yet to hear a decent (or indeed any) explanation as to the mechanism by which AI triggers psychosis that is materially different from any other trigger. Most people who suffer from this condition can be triggered by literally anything, including mundane things such as seeing a red cars slightly more often than they believe they should, then they concoct this conspiracy about an evil cabal of red car owners.

A little bit alarmist I feel, after all if it was this easy to be affected by AI about half the population would be dead by now, so clearly it’s not that simple.

It wasn’t that secret though was it? People knew about it, they just didn’t do anything about it.

He’ll back down like he always backs down. He doesn’t have the patience to be a true warlord, he’s the laziest man alive, he gets bored of things even when he’s not the one doing the work.

No needs a narrative to make America look bad. The Americans do it to themselves.

Is the article pay walled? I can read it in its entirety. I’d happily copy and paste it into the comments but it’s probably against the rules.

The goal is to be at war. The US is always at war. There is always an enemy to fight, if there is no convenient enemy to fight then you go to some random country, invade it, and thus create an enemy, who they proceed to then lose to.

For bonus points you should kill as many civilians as possible while claiming to be the liberators. Also you should, on the way out, backstab as many people that assisted you as possible.

Anytime anybody tells you “I don’t do drama”, 99% of the time they are the cause of all the drama.

Actually chill people pretty much never bring it up.

You don’t know anything about software development do you.

Copy editing won’t be an executive’s job. But yeah, they didn’t do the bare minimum which is concerning, it seems to indicate that they may not do the bare minimum on all of their articles. How much stuff went undiscovered?

I’m not going to outright say that journalist shouldn’t use AI to write articles, because it’s basically an enforceable rule, but there should be someone at some point whose ultimate responsibility is to make sure that the articles are at least factual, whether they were written by a human or not. Determining whether a quote is legitimate is pretty easy, you just have to Google the quote, if you can’t find any other sources you start to ask questions. As I said it’s the bare minimum they could have done.

I sincerely doubt that a collision in low earth orbit is going to result in debris being flicked up into geostationary orbits, the energy differences involved are just monumental.

Little bit of a nitpick but Kessler syndrome doesn’t care about how many satellites you have, and more about how many dead satellites you have hanging around on random orbits. You could put hundreds of millions of satellites in space as long as you had some sort of decommissioned program. You can always send up rockets if you can just move the satellites out of the way / know where they are.

None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres. Earths moon is too small to hold on to an atmosphere, and the Galilean moons of Jupiter are too cold for an atmosphere, the gases just freeze.

The best place would be either a space station in low earth orbit or of the L4 or L5 point. The data issue would be the problem though I suppose you could just use the data centres for training but not for active processing but then you would need to build data centres on earth for that.

Given that you’re going to build the earth data centres anyway you might as well do all of the processing on earth at the same time.

Yes I’d like to build data centres on Uranus one of the most distant planets in our solar system, and also one without a solid surface but who’s counting.